BIO

Photo by Brandon Gray, 2018

Tanya Lukin Linklater's performances in museums, videos, and installations have been shown in Canada and abroad. Her work centres knowledge production in and through orality, conversation, and embodied practices, including dance. While reckoning with histories that affect Indigenous peoples' lives, lands and ideas, she investigates insistence.

In 2016 she presented He was a poet and he taught us how to react and become this poetry (Parts 1 and 2) at La Biennale de Montréal - Le Grand Balcon. This work included video installation of Maria Tallchief and performance with five dancers through an open rehearsal process at the Museé d'art contemporain de Montréal.

In 2017, as a member of Wood Land School, she participated in Kahatenhstánion tsi na’tetiatere ne Iotohrkó:wa tánon Iotohrha / Drawing Lines from January to December in Montréal. Wood Land School participated in Under the Mango Tree - Sites of Learning, a gathering for documenta14 in Athens and Kassel. In 2017 Tanya was artist in residence at Art Gallery of Ontario where she made a performance, Sun Force, in response to Rita Letendre's retrospective, Fire & Light. In 2018 she presented a commissioned performance for Art for a New Understanding: Native Voices, 1950s to Now at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

Tanya has worked alongside dancers, Ceinwen Gobert, Hanako Hoshimi-Caines, Ivanie Aubin-Malo, Emily Law and Danah Rosales, among others. Other collaborators in recent years include composer and musician, Laura Ortman, in New York City, writer, Leanne Simpson, and artist, Duane Linklater.

Tanya studied at University of Alberta (M.Ed.) and Stanford University (A.B. Honours) where she received the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship and the Louis Sudler Prize for Creative and Performing Arts. She was awarded the Chalmers Professional Development Grant in 2010 and the K.M. Hunter Artist Award in Literature in 2013. In 2018 Tanya was chosen as the inaugural recipient of the Wanda Koop Resarch Fund, a $15,000 award recognizing a mid-career visual artist to fund research activities related to their practice, administered by Canadian Art.

She originates from the Native Villages of Afognak and Port Lions in southern Alaska and is based in northern Ontario, Canada.